The anticipation of love and death in Western Evenki personal folk songs

Evenki musical folklore has long attracted the attention of researchers. The earliest publication of traditional Evenki song texts was produced by G. Hut at the beginning of the 20th century. The first audio recording of Evenki songs was made using a phonograph by L. Y. Sternberg in 1910. The Phonogramme Archive of the Pushkin House in St. Petersburg includes extensive collections of traditional Evenki personal and shamanic songs, which were recorded in the first quar­‑ ter of the 20th century and still need to be transcribed and analyzed. Since then, a number of articles and monographs dedicated to Evenki songs, both traditional and modern, have been published. However, these publications have not included many actual texts of traditional Evenki songs. Collections of Evenki songs, published regularly since the 1930s, primarily reflect the “new wave” of songs written under the influence of the Russian/Soviet and global pop music traditions. This is the type of songs that we have had the opportunity to record since the turn of the 21st century among not only the Wes­­­­‑ tern, but also Eastern Evenkis. Therefore, the two traditional songs presented in this article are rare exceptions among our Evenki field data. They were recorded in 1999 in Turukhansk, the district centre, performed by Maria Fedorovna Bezrukikh (Kurmatova), an 80-year-old Evenki woman from the Arctic village of Sovetskaya Rechka. These are traditional personal songs, not of the performer herself, but of her elder relatives. The first one is the song of a young girl who dreams of meeting a yet unknown man with whom she could spend the rest of her life. The second song is that of an old woman anticipating her approaching death.