A New Angle on Makhtumkuli and His Literary Heritage-1

Abstract

The popularity of Makhtumkuli had surpassed not only the boundaries of the region where the Turkmens lived, but also of the limits of all of Central Asia in his life time. He broke the barrier between the literary language before him and the common language of the people, thus transforming the 18th century literary language and making it accessible to the people. Using the facilities of the Turkmen folk literature and Turkmen vernacular with some skill, the poet wrote poems which were easily understood and taken up by folk singers. The simple yet profound quality of his poems has, over two centuries, dominated the minds of not only the Turkmens but all Turkic peoples in the vast region from the Oxus to the Transcaucasus. Makhtumkuli has, by his style and the novelty he had brought to Turkmen literature, blazed a new trail and through a variety of themes in his poetry which appealed to people from various strata, has assumed the quality of a revered person- an "evliya." The original copy of the manuscript of his Divan has not been found. People who copied his poems later have allowed many mistakes which create a chaos in the text of the poetry, resulting in the misunderstanding of the text and the misinterpretation of the poetry. The poems which have been appropriated to Makhtumkuli in the Soviet Union are especially distorting the literary heritage of the great poet. Important studies of the poetry of Makhtumkuli had been carried out in the Soviet era. However, the collections of his poetry are prepared not in the language of Makhtumkuli, but in the modern Turkmen literary language. There is a tendency to increase the number of poems of Makhtumkuli in Turkmenistan, but it is a well-known fact that in no manuscript the number of poems exceeds three hundred. And this fact has never been taken into account