The Aldan-Maadyr Rebellion of 1883–1885 in Tuvan Folklore

 Introduction. Up to the early 1940s, when it came to discuss Tuva’s history of the nineteenth century, related conventional opinions would state that  the so-called ‘sixty arat-livestock raiders’ were ‘mere thieves, marauders, and robbers’ to have stolen cattle from rich noyon-landlords in Mongolia. And only during the independence period — that of the Tuvan People’s Republic (TPR, 1921–1944) — leaders of the Republic and the Tuvan People’s Revolutionary Party (TPRP) decided to collect and record oral narratives — memories of children and relatives of the Rebellion’s participants to establish the truth about the ‘sixty heroes’, investigate some actual reasons and goals of the event, systematize and complete related sources, documents in Classical Mongolian once housed by the State Archive of the TPR (nowadays — National Archive of the Tyva Republic) and the TPRP Party Archive. Goals. The article attempts an analysis of multi-genre folklore texts dealing with the Aldan-Maadyr Rebellion (1883–1885). To facilitate that, the work shall determine the latter’s genre features and identify key plot/motif patterns, artistic and stylistic aspects. Materials. The study examines writings of historians (Yu. Aranchyn, V. Dulov, Sh. Chimitdorzhiev, V. Kisel), folklorists (G. Kurbatsky, Z. Kyrgys), as well as manuscripts contained in scientific archives of the Tuvan Institute for Humanities and Applied Socioeconomic Research. The analysis involves research methods inherent to the cultural historical approach, since the specified folklore narratives would take shape in contexts of dramatic events experienced by the people, and rest on traditional images and symbols of the local folklore tradition. Results. The study shows the Tuvan people’s historical memories have been carefully preserving the feat of ancestors, their heroic contribution to the national liberation struggle against the tyranny of the Qing-Chinese occupiers and other exploiters. Conclusions. So, in terms of ideological and thematic contents, the examined texts can be identified as historical folklore patterns that shaped in the mid-1880s, and their artistic and stylistic characteristics attest to those were composed within the Tuvan folk-poetic tradition.

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