FORMAL AND STYLISTIC COMPONENTS OF M.O. AUEZOV'S EPIC NOVEL"THE PATH OF ABAI"

The ancient epic tradition significantly influenced the formation of the modern Kazakh literary language. It has become the main base of modern philosophy, literature and aesthetics. But in that literary era, when the great novel by M.O. Auezov was being created, they did not write about the epic tradition –the bearer of healthy moral principles –and especially about the zhyrau tradition, attaching a label to it –"idealization of the khan's past and patriarchal-Bay reality." It is for this rea-son that the term zhyrau is not mentioned in the epic novel. This image has not been recreated due to the historical reality of the New Time, the time of Abai, when the Zhyrau descended from the historical arena, although the writer's artistic logic allows us to trace the immortal oral-literary con-tinuity of the traditions of the previous era by the akyns. Today we call this phenomenon Steppe Knowledge.Despite their special status, their distinctive social functions, their worldview and ways of inter-preting reality, both Zhyrau and akyns go back to the same source, the ancient oral foundation, from where they draw rhythms, plots, motifs, themes and images, means of artistic expression and depic-tion, what we now call «the formulaic style»at the suggestion of epicologists M. Parry and A.B. Lord.Since this mighty stylistic technique of Zhyrau is still traced in the works of the akyns of the Abai epoch and it manifests itself with special force in the works of the most talented akyns of the New Time, then the formulaic law that forms the language and style, the entire formulaic aesthetics of the poets of the New Time, should be studied in a comparative aspect. This is the main purpose of article.