The Evolution of Scientific Approaches to the Scrutiny of the Epic Narrator: History and the Present Day

The phenomenon of variability in the singing of different storytellers has always attracted the attention of researchers from the early stages of researching and accumulating epic heritage. Subsequently, this direction was actively developed by Western folklorists, while domestic researchers of the Soviet period, along with folklorists of other nations of the USSR, continued to adhere to the “historical school,” which was formed on the basis of ideological attitudes. As a result, such an important aspect as the artistic specificity of the epic and its historical and poetic dimension was overshadowed. It was only in the early 1960s that the first researches devoted to the connection between the storyteller and the epic text began to appear in Soviet folklore studies, when the previous one-sided approach itself became the subject of historical reflection. However, the view of the epic exclusively as a product of folk collective creativity was not completely overcome, which prevented Soviet epic studies from fully revealing the problem of the interaction between the epic storyteller and the text. The persistence of the so-called historical concept makes the issues raised in this study and developed in contemporary scholarship on epic storytelling particularly relevant. The aim of the research is to identify and analyze the characteristics of the interaction between the storyteller and the epic text in the context of performance variability, as well as to trace the evolution of scientific approaches to this problem in domestic and foreign epic studies. Research object: epic heritage represented in verbal tradition, with an emphasis on the performance of zhyrshy and storytellers. Research subject: variability of epic texts in the performances of different storytellers and the influence of individual performance styles on the formation of epics; as well as scientific approaches to the exploration of this variability in the history of folklore studies. The following methods were used: theoretical (analysis of scientific and methodological literature on the problem under scrutiny, analysis of the content of contemporary literature).