Biography Kenin Lopsana

All over the world, only three elected were awarded this highest award of the American Shaman Studies Fund. Among them are the Doctor of Historical Sciences Mongush Borakhovich Kenin-Lopsan, who received this honorary title in the city of he collected Shamanic hymns for more than 50 years, visited all corners of Tuva, met with old shamans, was friends with connoisseurs of Tuvan antiquity.

He was blessed on a good and difficult path to the world of Tuvan shamanism by the Leningrad professor, the famous orientalist Sergei Efimovich Malov. It is symbolic that the one who was destined to become later “a living treasure” was born on the banks of the Hondergie River, which has long been popularly called the “singing river”. A few years ago, on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of Mongusch Borakhovich, I interviewed him.

Here is what he answered to my question about his ancestors: “I was born during the spring migration. The yurt was quickly put under a huge larch. A river of a cup-tal flowed nearby. So I can be called the son of a nomad. There were ten sisters and six brothers in one yurt. Mom was a craftswoman and a narrator, father was a hunter, a bone -right, a connoisseur of folk traditions and prosperity.

On the paternal line, we had a famous shaman and the People's Master of Donduk. Our son-in-law Sat Schirtyki, a wizard shaman, could have a barefoot to dance at the stake, cause rain, drive hail. The grandmother Kular Khandjap was popularly called Ulug-Kham, or the Great Shaman, Dear Ham, or heavenly shaman, because according to Tuvin’s custom it was forbidden to call a respected person, and as you know, in the Tuvan environment, shamans and shamans were at that time the most respected people.

From G., twelve days after the arrest, her son was arrested by an illiterate shaman-grandmother, she was convicted “for counter-revolutionary activities” for five years in prison. In the city of Shamanka, Khandyzhap sat in a concentration camp in the city of Chernogorsk. She talked with everyone without a tongue. She was among the prisoners of a shaman-god and clairvoyant.

While in a concentration camp, she predicted the date of death of Joseph Stalin. After the death of Stalin, she was released. She died on the way to her native yurt. In January, when I was nine years old, my grandmother Kular Khandjap gave me the first initiation and predicted the fate of a large white shaman. ” In the yurt of his father, Mongush with a frill of heart listened to legends, legends, epic legends, repeated the tongue twisters of the sacred phrases.

With the advent of his own writing in Tuva, he was one of the first to learn to write his name in the snow. Among the best graduates of the Kyzyl school, he was sent to Leningrad to continue his studies. Kenin-Lopsan was lucky enough to get into the only Tuvan group in history, gained for training at the Eastern Department of Leningrad University. I was interested in looking at the dome of the Isakievsky Cathedral.

Here, in my homeland, I got used to the snowy peaks, and there I saw a dome. As it seemed to me, similar to a big yurt. He looked at the unusually hunchbacked curve of the divorce bridge: on two sides, his people walk, cars walk, and the steamer also sails under the bridge. At the bridge I saw who I heard about in my father’s fairy tales - Leva! The most memorable for me was when we were given cards.

This was my first practical lesson - to buy bread on cards in a special store on Nevsky. For me personally, the word “bread” is magical, sacred, elevated. At the university, we were first called the “dumb people”-they go quietly and do not talk to anyone-because we spoke poorly in Russian. After the first year, we spoke and already in the second year successfully made scientific reports.

I even got the nickname "Tuvin Cicero." The theme of the first student scientific work of Kenin-Lopsan was the “Air Burial of the Tuvan shaman”. At the end of the Eastern Faculty of LSU, Kenin-Lopsan classmates in their homeland were waiting for a brilliant career and prestigious positions in Soviet and party structures. However, a similar path was unacceptable to him.

Mongush Borakhovich, in the words of the Russian poet, "made a career that he did not do it." He taught the Tuvin language and literature, worked as an editor in a local publishing house. Interest in the historical past of the native land, the desire to preserve Kenin-Lopsan for the descendants of its treasures and rarities three decades ago to serve in the Tuvin Republican Museum of Local Lore.

Here he tirelessly collects Shaman folklore, ancient manuscripts and books, ethnographic and archaeological materials. But the main thing in his life has always remained creativity. Per Kenin-Lopsan belongs numerous novels, novels, stories, poems, translations into the Tuvian language of works of Russian and foreign poets. And the most cherished is the publications of the folklore of the Tuvan shamanism, where he in poetic form sets out the alges-the prosperity of the heavenly shaman, heavenly, the algin of the shaman from the forest virgin, from evil spirits, etc.

Kenin-Lopsan defends the candidate dissertation on the subjects and poetics of Tuvan shamanism. The experience of historical and ethnographic reconstruction. "I remember how many difficulties and obstacles he had to overcome, because at that time the research on a similar topic was actually banned, they were allowed to write only from the standpoint of militant atheism, he interpreted the topic as if from inside, as soon as the grandson of the great shaman, the son of the storyteller, a man with the shaman’s soul.

After the successful defense of the candidate dissertation, Kenin-Lopsan tried to go to work at the Tuvin Research Institute of Language, Literature and History. He told how he came with a statement to N. Merdobov, deputy director of the institute, who first asked the question of his scientific plans. Merdobov is an ascetic appearance, with a tough gaze of impenetrable eyes, in my view was always associated with Jesuit, who wants to seem even more holy than the pope.

His whole appearance left no doubt that he was the Marxist-Leninets even more orthodox than Salchak Toka himself, who was often called “Tuvin Stalin”. Merdobov sharply read Mongusha Borakhovich. He said that at that time “when steel spaceships plow the vast expanses of the universe”, lines are recalled in the city that Kenin-Lopsan wrote 20 years ago: “I live in the world for a long time, knew the truth and deception.

Now, take at least the whole of Tuva, will there be a living shaman? But times have changed. Now, today, when an ancient culture is being revived, things are different. In St. Petersburg, Mongush Borakhovich defended his doctoral dissertation dedicated to Tuvan shamanism. In November, the Tuva Government in the same city of the Ministry of Health recommended organizing an experiment to jointly work with patients of professional doctors and shamans.

It was recommended to create the necessary conditions for healing to practicing shamans. To the question “Are you engaged in shamanistic practice? I only help them, because I myself am old. In the museum room, we conducted a rite of purification. And now all of us became good - no one is late for work, everyone respects their work and team. ” Nowadays, international recognition has come to Mongush Borakhovich Kenin-Lopsan.

He visited at the invitation of lectures and reports in the USA, in many European countries. Treasurer. In the literal and figurative sense. He is the keeper of the material and spiritual values ​​of the Tuvans. He worked for most of his life in the museum, collecting and protecting the priceless treasures of many generations. This is already a great thing.

However, he is not only the keeper, but also the carrier, collector and researcher of these values. Perhaps I will not be mistaken if I say that today in Tuva there is no person who is more aware in the spiritual life of the Tuvan people than our anniversary. Therefore, his birthday is involuntarily and is rightfully becoming a good reason for traveling to the world of Tuvin's soul.

M. Kenin-Lopsan, of course, predetermined the multifaceted creative activity of M. Kenin-Lopsan, his natural gift and hard work, as well as his era, his happy fate. And in this whirlpool of life, the personality of M. Kenin-Lopsan formed, in my opinion, the successful historical circumstances and the people surrounding him. Three cradles, three schools-Hondergei, Leningrad, Kyzyl-these are truly great life universities that score the phenomenon of Kenin-Lopsan.

The whole further creative life of M. Kenin-Lopsan developed so multifaceted that I want to figuratively call him a man-organ. A wide variety of instruments of the human soul participate in this orchestra: the finest ISIS melody is his lyrical poetry, the penetrating melody of Byzaanchi - his romantic prose, the overflowed sounds of the limbi - his magnificent stories for children, the velvet sounds of Shoor - his folkloristic notes, the calling rhythms of the shamanic tambourine - his ethnographic studies.

The leitmotif of this orchestra sounds the anthem of the Tuvan people. The main directions of his creative activity - writing, scientific and public - are also multifaceted in themselves. The history of life, morals, customs of the Tuvans, their psychology and soul expressed themselves in the work of Mongush Kenin-Lopsan, primarily through works of art. He, as a poet, publicist and prose writer, made, one might say, a kind of artistic chronicle of the life of the Tuvan people.

The peculiarity of Kenin-Lopsan prose lies in the fact that it in it is factographically accurately, ethnographically convex, compositionally contrasting, with romantic pathos, in a special indirect form of autobiographism, the traditional worldview of the Tuvan people is recreated. In his work since the beginning of the X M.