იაკობ გოგებაშვილი და ქართული ფოლკლორი

Abstract

In the second half of the 19th century, Iakob Gogebashvili actively supported all of the signifi cant cultural-educational initiatives of the prominent Georgians of the 1860s. His contribution to the collection and publication of the Georgian folklore specimens is particularly valuable, as, before him, there was hardly any practice of recording or publishing the folk texts in Georgia. Iakob Gogebashvili, as a great teacher, writer and educator, worked tirelessly to popularize Georgian oral traditions. Iakob Gogebashvili’s interest in folklore had certain reasons. In the country where the Russifi cation regime raged, folklore was one of the most powerful tools to maintain the nation’s cultural identity, and it played a big role in the spiritual life and national consolidation of the Georgian people. On the other hand, the folklore, which was saved by the people orally, was threatened of being gradually forgotten and disappearing. Therefore, Iakob Gogebashvili was interested in collecting and publishing the specimens of Georgian oral tradition. Right from the outset, Iakob Gogebashvili got actively engaged in the folkloristic and collection activities of the Society for the Spreading of Literacy among Georgians. On the instructions of the Society, in 1882, jointly with Petre Umikashvili, he compiled the fi rst guiding instructions for those interested in folklore collection that meet even the recognized standards of modern folklore and, is, therefore, practically and scientifi cally valuable to date. The authors of the instructions laid out the principles of recording the folk texts, thus making the instructions a kind of a methodical guide for the collectors of oral traditions. The guide disapproved of the conversion and stylization of folk texts, which was an established practice in folklore studies in the second half of the 19th century. According to the guide, the folklore samples were to be recorded in the same way as narrated. By the time Iakob Gogebashvili compiled “The guide to collect folk texts”, he had suffi cient experience regarding recording the folkloristic texts and his method to identify and fi nd oral patterns scattered among the people. In the 70s of the 19th century, Iakob Gogebashvili wrote down folk poems and fairy tales, the whole collection of folklore specimens, in his native village Variani, which he, for a certain pedagogical purpose, later included in his b ooks for children: “The Mother Tongue” and “The Door to Nature”. It may be said that Iakob Gogebashvili was the fi rst to put the question of so-called “certifi cation” of oral specimens of the Georgian folklore on the agenda. In his opinion, a folk text needed “a certifi cate”, i.e. specifi c data about the folklore work, in particular, the place of the text recording, the recorder and the narrator. Iakob Gogebashvili knew well that it was this data making the naturally anonymous folk specimens reliable and scientifi cally valuable, as, without the accurate documents, a folk text could not be authentic. Iakob Gogebashvili was also required to fi x the profession of the folk text narrator/performer; he also considered it important to note if the narrator was a professional performer: a bagpiper or a mandolin player. By using Georgian proverbs, Iakob Gogebashvili wrote tales for children, which he, together with oral folk specimens, included in the reading book of his “The Mother Tongue” and “The Door to Nature”. The popularity of “The Mother Tongue” by Iakob Gogebashvili was mainly caused by the fact that it contained a lot of specimens of Georgian folk literature. The folkloristic works chosen by Iakob Gogebashvili for his book were easy to understand for his little readers, on the one hand, and gave the children moral values and taught them how to love their homeland and people, on the other.