Academician Mukhtar Imanov, director of the Institute of Folklore, published his article in English entitled “The Problem of Historicity in the Epic: Archetypal Thinking and Epic Creativity” in the “International Journal of Folklore Studies” (UHAD), which is indexed in prestigious scientific databases was published.

The journal “ULAKBIM”, which publishes the modern researches in the field of folklore, is indexed in international databases such as “Dergi Park”, “ERIHPLUS”, “EBSCO”. 

In the article the author analyzes the attitude of folklore to historical reality in the context of epic thought and emphasizes that historicity in folklore is not reflected at the level of a simple description within the existing scientific-theoretical approaches to the problem. At this level the author states that historicity in folklore is a component of archetypal thinking and acquires its own interpretation content in the context of the traditional attitude of collective creativity. Therefore, it is not justified to approach the events or images described in folklore in the context of simple historicity. To get to the main part of the matter one must approach historicity in the context of more archetypal thoughts and meanings. In this context, academician Mukhtar Imanov notes that both the historicity existing in folklore thought and the reflection of real history in folklore are in all cases a part of the creative event. In this sense, reflecting the archetypes of the people’s imagination rather than reflecting historical events and historical personalities is one of the characteristic features of folklore as a whole, along with the epic. The author shows in the article that the approach to the concept of historicism in folklore, as well as the poetic features of individual genres, also has the certain specificity in terms. In this sense, historicism in folklore appears not as a simple biographical description, nor as a simple description of real events, but within the framework of the internal poetic system of the epic.   

In the article the addition to heroic epics such as “The Book of  Dede Gorgud”, “Koroglu”, “Gurbani”, “Abbas-Gülgaz” and other love epics, various aspects of folklore and historical relations were clarified in the article.