A.N. Samoylovich on the Turkish folk shadow theater “Karagöz”

The article is a publication of a previously unpublished lecture by famous turkologist A.N. Samoylovich (1880-1938) on the Turkish folk shadow theater “Karagöz”, which provides information about the origin of this genre of Turkish urban folklore, the history of its study in Europe and Russia, an overview of the main plots and characteristics of the theater characters. “Karagöz” is a Turkish shadow theater, whose action is based on a series of dialogues that reflect the stereotypical characteristics of various ethnic and social groups in Turkey. The antagonist characters Khajivat and Karagöz, appear at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the action. There isn’t any written source that would reliably disclose the circumstances of the creation of this theater in Turkey. The Turks probably borrowed the shadow theater from the peoples of the Middle East, to whom, in turn, it came from Southeast Asia. The theater's plots were transmitted verbally from the teacher by the puppeteer's student.This lecture, dated 1926, is not only one of the first studies of the Turkish folk theater in Russia, but also the rarest translation of one of the performances of the Karagöz theater into Russian even at the moment. The material is contained in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art in the fund of the theater director and teacher M.M. Korenev (1889-1880). We commented the lecture (the notes are given in page-by-page footnotes and marked with initials), and a number of typos and spelling errors have been corrected.