Oriental Studies (Dec 2021)
‘Ödgä tsaga saatulin dun’ — ‘Budzhala Yegor zalud’: Yegor Budzhalov’s Anti-Lullaby and Morkhadzhi Narmaev’s Parody
Abstract
Introduction. So far, the genres of lullaby and poetic parody in the Kalmyk poetry of the twentieth century have not attracted much attention. Born in the late 1920s — early 1930s, the tradition was short-lived. While their genres were explicitly or implicitly marked, the works of Kalmyk poets in question were primarily oriented towards the Russian literary tradition. However, they expanded the genre paradigm of Kalmyk poetry in the intercultural dialogue. The relevance and novelty of the article is apparent, granted its focus on the two innovative works by Egor Budzhalov and Morkhadzhi Narmaev; these are single works that belong to the genres of anti-lullaby and satirical parody as part of the 1990s literary polemics of the contemporaries. This article aims to introduce these little-known poems of the two poets as representative of their contributions to the genres. Materials and methods. The sources for the study, Budzhalov’s “Ödgä tsaga saatulin dun” (“Modern Lullaby Song”, 1991) and Narmaev’s “Budzhala Egor zalud” (“To the man Egor Budzhalov”, 1991), were published in the local newspaper Khalmg ünn. The study of historical-literary milieu and realia, comparative-contrastive and hermeneutic approaches were employed to examine the poetic pieces in the context of literary, socio-political, ideological, and social processes on the eve of the country’s collapse; also, the biographical data of the poets that belong to different generations was helpful in the analysis of their ideological positions, as well as the authorial voices in the texts under study. Results. The study shows the innovative character of the poets’ efforts at creating a lullaby for adults, or an anti-lullaby song, and a satirical parody; these were to remain single samples, granted that the Kalmyk lullabies are mainly addressed to infants, and parodies are of a friendly character. Their works reflect the authors’ polar views on the realities in the 1980s and 1990s: criticism, on the one hand, and the defense of socialism, communist ideas, on the other hand. Conclusions. Budzhalov’s poem may look like a lullaby for children at first sight while, in fact, it is a lullaby for adults or rather an anti-lullaby, with the formulaic chorus baiu bai, a marker of the genre, acquiring in his piece the opposite message: wake up, do not sleep, act. Narmaev enters the dialogue with his younger contemporary, his poem also representing a synthesis of genres: a message, an open letter in verse, and a satirical parody. However, his parody is also transformed when the author parodies not so much his fellow poet’s style but the authorial implications concerning the Soviet reality. The tradition of literary polemics was not continued in Kalmyk poetry.
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