From Folk Epics to Epic Monuments: Studying and Publishing Epic Lore in the Soviet Union (1920s–1960s)

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I problematize the existing analyses of the 1952 conference on the Manas epic either as a salvage operation conducted by USSR Academy of Sciences or as a locally mounted defence in response to the party-led offensive against Turkic national epics. I argue that notwithstanding the efforts invested in the elaboration of a distinctively Soviet approach to the study of folklore – an approach of a Marxist-Leninist extraction articulated around the concept of “folkness” – in the case of epics the boundary between “folk” and “national” remained blurred and easily instrumentalized, both by the detractors of epic lore and by its defenders. Until the early 1950s this blurred boundary led to frequent and abrupt movements between celebrating epics and castigating them, movements that were as much contingent on USSR domestic policies as on its frantic desire to distance Soviet scholarly traditions from “bourgeois” science. I also posit that because of the uncertain boundary between “folk” and “national” and the propensity of these concepts to feed from and spill into politics and geopolitics, the “solution” to the 1952 crisis, pace Bennigsen (1975), could not have been political. Instead, the 1952 Manas conference helped save epic lore in the Soviet Union only to the extent that it triggered a series of follow-up events at which metropolitan scholars reconceptualised epic lore from folk epics that were crucial for the identity of Soviet nations and the vitality of their national literatures to “epic monuments” that were irreversibly consigned to the past. Such a reconceptualization helped solve some of the dilemmas pestering the work of epic scholars and reassert the renown of the Soviet Union as the land of epic treasure trove.