SUMMARY:

Suleiman Stal’skii, who represented the so-called bespis’mennye semi-folkloristic literatures at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (1934) and who was proclaimed by Maxim Gorky “the Homer of the twentieth century” (along with Djambul Djabaev) was a signature figure of early Soviet multinational literature. In fact, the well-documented “Djambul mythology” was created in the 1930s based on the “Stal’skii myth.” The article focuses on Stal’skii and the methods by which poetic production in the former Soviet republics can be addressed; on the concept of authorship under the conditions of totalitarianism; on the methodological approaches that could structure a better understanding of authorship under these very specific circumstances; on the relationship between the populism of Socialist realist literature, poetic production of these “masters of oral national creativity,” and the image of the leader; on the role of translation in disseminating “oral literature,” where folklore was coupled with the new media and new technologies of political manipulation; on the mythology of Suleiman Stal’skii and its role in creating a national literary canon; on orality and literacy; on the particular promotion of types of “poets” in the republics; on the currency of “epic” poetry in the 1930s; and on the range of devices that were used in fashioning the Stal’skii myth.
Since the texts of “people’s bards” such as Stal’skii were published straight away, it is impossible to determine what the “originals” looked like. These “originals” were commissioned by one person, communicated to the “author” by another, verbalized by a third one, written down by a fourth, translated literally by a fifth, given a literary form by a sixth, edited by a seventh, censored by an eighth, and so on. The author himself did not speak the language in which his texts were circulated, and the “originals,” even if they did exist, have been lost. In any event, these texts are not authentic by definition, and not only because they functioned mostly in a different language. The question of Stal’skii’s translations is central to an understanding of the “people’s bards” phenomenon and the whole Soviet multinational literary project. This literature had its own reader who was different from the national one, and required a special type of writer who was de facto dysfunctional in his native language. It was a “national literature” not because of its language, for it functioned outside its language and its ethnos, but national-Soviet literature designed to serve “the Soviet people” as a whole. Each national literature delivered something from its traditions that was required for the formation of Soviet people.