duma

A Duma (Ukrainian: дума, plural dumy) is an oral epic poem which originated in Ukraine during the Cossack Era in the sixteenth century, possibly based on earlier Kyivan epic forms. Historically, dumy were performed by itinerant Cossack bards called kobzari, who accompanied themselves on a kobza or a bandura, who were often (blind) itinerant musicians who retained the kobzar appellation and accompanied their singing by playing a bandura (rarely a kobza) or a relya/lira (a Ukrainian variety of hurdy-gurdy). Dumas are sung in recitative, in the so-called "duma mode", a variety of the Dorian mode with a raised fourth degree.

Dumy were vocal works built around historical events, many dealing with military action in some forms. Embedded in these historical events were religious and moralistic elements. There are themes of the struggle of the Cossacks against enemies of different faiths or events occurring on religious feast-days. Although the narratives of the dumy mainly revolve around war, the dumy themselves do not promote courage in battle. The dumy rather impart a moral message on how one should conduct oneself properly in the relationships with family, community, and church. Modern scholarship has stressed that the prominence of death, defeat and lament in the dumy does not set them apart from other epic traditions: similar patterns of heroic death and tragic denouement are also found in the Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied, Beowulf and other European heroic narratives. However, the kobzari did not play only religious songs and dumy. They also played "satirical songs (sometimes openly scabrous); dance melodies; either with or without words; lyric songs; and historical songs". In the 1920s and 1930s the first large-scale scholarly corpus of Ukrainian dumy was prepared by folklorist Kateryna Hrushevska for the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Her two-volume edition Ukrainski narodni dumy (1927; 1931) assembled, critically compared and annotated many recorded variants of epic songs and is regarded in later scholarship as a foundational reference work for the study of the duma tradition.