The historical stories, legends and many other genres of folklore reflects the major epochs and significant events in their brightly and clearly expressed worldview, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, history of the Kazakh people.
A presentation of 100-volume series of Kazakh folklore “Babalar sozi”, which was issued under the state program "Cultural Heritage" initiated by the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, was held in the National Academic Library.
The main aim of the event is to present our rich 100-volume Code of Kazakh folklore, the national pride, to the wider public, the Kazakh people, inform the world community about the unprecedented edition of this series.
Over the years, folklore has not been published in serial form. There were separate book collections. The work on the publishing of national folklore as a multivolume work started only in the eighties; however, only 17 volumes were published.
A comprehensive study and publication of Kazakh folklore started only in the years of independence. Thanks to the implementation of the State program "Cultural Heritage" initiated by the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev, a large part of our national folklore was published in 100 volumes under the title "Babalar sozi" ("Ancestral Heritage "). For example, only the heroic epic consists of 20 volumes, historical from 13, religious epics from 7, novelistic epics from 13, love epics from 8, tales from 5 volumes. All of them are the major genres of folklore. The little genres consists of 1-3 volumes. Such an enormous work was done decently by the Institute of Literature and Art named after M.Auezov and Publishing house "Foliant" of Astana.
Today, there is no state in the world that collected and analyzed all of their national wealth, conducted a huge textual work on the basis of research work and published a definitive edition of 100-volumes of national folklore. In some countries of CIS, this work is just beginning.
Presentation begun with a greeting speech of the Minister of Culture and Information Mukhtar Kul-Muhammed Abraruly. The exhibition of books published under the direction of the section “Folklore studies, literature and local history" of the Public Council of the State program "Cultural heritage" will be organized as a part of the presentation.
