The legends of the Don Kalmyks in the archives of I.I. Popov

The article describes “The legends of the Don Kalmyks” manuscript from the archives of Ivan Ivanovitch Popov, a collector of Kalmyk folklore, which are kept in the State Arkhive of Rostov region. I.I. Popov had recorded examples of various genres of Kalmyk folklore - tales, riddles, proverbs, “factual legends” and a song from the Kalmyk heroic epic of Jangar. Only a song from the epic of Jangar and some of the tales have been introduced into academic discourse of all this material. Folklore texts recorded in 1890-1894 have not been properly described and introduced to academia for 125 years. One of such under-researched genres of Kalmyk folk tradition recorded by I.I. Popov are legends. This article is a preliminary description of the manuscript with examples of such, with its full contents presented for the first time ever with a full list of the legends. It has been discovered that the manuscript is incomplete - only sixteen of the twenty-nine texts declared in the contents have been included. There is an idea about where the missing copybooks might be - their introduction to academia is extremely important for Kalmyk folklore studies. The peculiarities of how I.I. Popov used to record oral texts are examined: folklore data both in Old Kalmyk Clear Script and in Cyrillics (with auxiliary symbols) with a parallel translation into Russian and detailed comments, pasportisation and variants of the tale. The fact that of sixteen legends presented in the manuscript, fifteen had been recorded from the same storyteller - the Don Kalmyk Kirsan Atinov - is also characteristic of the manuscript. Six legends are transliterated and translated into Russian, four of them are introduced to academia for the first time.

Don Kalmyks, Kalmyk folklore, legends, fables, tales, variant, storyteller, recording, archive, Old Kalmyk Clear Script