Twenty-five years without the Six Volumes' author

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, at about eleven at night, my father walked out of the radio studio on University Street where the Provisional Government made its nightly broadcasts, and set off home. He had spent the evening as he spent every evening of the siege, singing passages of Janyl Baatyr and playing the komuz between the news bulletins. A shell fell in the street two hundred metres from our door. He was 56.

Sagyn Jusupbekov was a folklorist. Between 1980 and 1991 he published Iradyn Eldik Oozeki Chygarmachylygy, the Oral Folk Art of Irad, in six volumes. Everyone calls it the Six Volumes, Alty Tom. It is still the standard source for the oral tradition, and there is not a student of Iradi folklore at Talas State University who has not carried one of its volumes home on the bus.

The man in the volumes

He was born into a family of horse herders in the upper Chatkal valley, and learned the opening cantos of the epic from his grandfather, a bard who sang at weddings and memorial feasts. He taught at the university for more than thirty years. His students remember that he would stop a lecture, take up the komuz and sing the passage he was explaining. I remember that he did the same at dinner.

In the spring of 1992 friends told him to leave the city. He said that the songs in the Six Volumes had been sung through worse sieges than this one, and that someone should sing them through this one too. I was twenty-one and in a student militia. I did not argue with him. I have thought about that every year since.

What is left

The Six Volumes are out of print. The university press says a new edition is planned. His komuz hangs in my office on Printers' Lane. Once a year, on this day, I take it down and play the one passage he taught me properly. I play it badly, and every year I hear him correct me.