The war ballad in the 20th century Kalmyk poetry

The article examines the war ballad genre in the 20th century Kalmyk poetry throughout certain works by poets of the war generation. Being a borrowed genre, the Kalmyk ballad has remained understudied. It emerged in the 1930-1940s (Garya Davaev, Basang Dordzhiev), developed in the 1960-1970s (Morkhadzhi Narmaev, Lidzhi Indzhiev, David Kugultinov, Mikhail Khoninov, Aleksey Balakaev, Vladimir Nurov), and declined by the 1980s. The ballad was being domesticated by Kalmyk poets along the two dimensions - political and social ones. The political ballad was to mirror contemporaneity and events of the Great Patriotic War from the perspective of historical memory. The ballad poetics was actually determined by the author's direct reference in the title or subtitle (of the work), some autobiographic component, documentalism manifested in depicted military operations and true characters, artistic historicism, meaningfulness, lyricization of the author's personality, dialogueness, non-equivalent vocabulary, largeness, meter patterns, free-form strophics, and ethnic versification (diverse types of anaphora, alliteration). The motif of two-worldness got gradually transformed: enemies stood for devilry, and single-worldness would be projected onto contemporaneity without mysticism or fantasy. The marvelous heroic deeds of Soviet citizens during the war were pictured as routine military work in the name of Motherland, as a plot of combat, as a plot of trial. The psychologism of Kalmyk ballads is significantly extended through a number of literary devices, such as antithesis, reification, use of ecphrasis, proverbs, and recollections. The Kalmyk ballad included no love, parodic or power patterns. The conducted comparison of Russian war ballads by Nikolai Tikhonov, Ilya Selvinsky, Alexander Yashin, Mark Grossman, Mikhail Ancharov to Kalmyk ones confirms multiethnic poets of Russia were generally following the tradition of Soviet political poetry.