Folk Social and Household Baits of the Bashkirs: Features of Composition and Artistic-Aesthetic Originality

Introduction. Having emerged at the intersection of folklore and literature the bait genre in Bashkir folklore appeared on the basis of the poetical form beit, which denotes a distich in different genres of classical poetry in the Near and Middle East. In Bashkir and Tatar folklore, the bait is a genre which narrates historic or every day incidents of tragic or highly dramatic character. Bashkir folk baits are divided into military-historic and socio-domestic ones. Goals. The purpose of the article is to explore some Bashkir social and domestic baits as a genre at the intersection of oral and written literatures, and to reveal their artistic features and peculiarities in composition. To facilitate this, the paper seeks resolve to a number of tasks, such as to identify compositional characteristics of the baits of this type, indicate their variability, motivational series, historical roots of the compositional characteristics, examine the structure of the baits, as well as highlight their artistic and aesthetic diversity. Materials for research are documents of folklore research expeditions organized at various periods and subsequently published in the volume ‘Bait’ of the multivolume series ’Bashkir Folk Art‘, and some later ones were included into the collected publications of folklore expedition materials. The paper outlines the materials on social and everyday baits contained in the ‘Bait’ volume, since the genre is understudied. The absence of publications and monographs proves this. The authors make an attempt to fill the gap with the help of discovered folklore materials. To guarantee an objective conclusion and to demonstrate artistic originality of Bashkir folk social and domestic baits more accurately the paper also makes references to works by Tatar scholars. Results. The article delineates vivid distinctive artistic and aestetic, ideological and thematic, artistic and functional features and originality of social and domestic baits. Unlike baits of other genre types (social and historical baits of various sorts), the baits under consideration are characterized by epithets, similes, parallel constructions and diminutive forms in the addressing, beginning, final parts, etc. It was also revealed that social and domestic baits are ideologically and thematically similar to epitaphs. Those similar features discovered by Tatar researchers are largely inherent to Bashkir folklore too.

baits, Bashkir folklore, Bashkir literature, social and everyday baits, artistic and aesthetic peculiarities, epithets, comparisons

1. Sources

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