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ADuma (Ukrainian:дума, pluraldumy) is an oralepic poem which originated inUkraine during theCossack Era in the sixteenth century, possibly based on earlier Kyivan epic forms. Historically,dumy were performed by itinerant Cossack bards calledkobzari, who accompanied themselves on akobza or abandura, who were often (blind) itinerant musicians who retained the kobzar appellation and accompanied their singing by playing abandura (rarely a kobza) or arelya/lira (a Ukrainian variety ofhurdy-gurdy). Dumas are sung in recitative, in the so-called "duma mode", a variety of theDorian mode with a raised fourth degree.
Dumy were vocal works built around historical events, many dealing with military action in some forms.[1] 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 thedumy mainly revolve around war, thedumy themselves do not promote courage in battle.[2]: 573 Thedumy rather impart a moral message on how one should conduct oneself properly in the relationships with family, community, and church.[2]: 573 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 theSong of Roland, theNibelungenlied,Beowulf and other European heroic narratives.[3] 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".[2]: 570 In the 1920s and 1930s the first large-scale scholarly corpus of Ukrainiandumy was prepared by folkloristKateryna Hrushevska for the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Her two-volume editionUkrainski 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.[4][5]
First mention of the term "Duma" in the meaning of epic song comes from a Polish translation of theBible published inKraków in 1561. The word duma originates from Polish rather than from Ukrainian (or Ruthenian). The word duma was already used in Old Polish literature (Old Polish literature spanned from the medieval period through the Baroque era). Polish Dumas typically told of the deeds of a historical hero or an otherwise unknown person who had achieved something noteworthy. Its action was usually set in an atmospheric landscape and included reflections on the past. The style of the duma was simple, often drawing on elements of everyday speech. Later, Polish dumy were also written with elements of the supernatural—centered on meditations over knights’ graves, ruins, or nocturnal settings—as well as romantic dumy recounting the amorous adventures of knights. Poles used the word duma for their own ballades as well as foreign ballades (including Ukrainian ones), from very early on,Mikołaj Rej called Ukrainian epics dumy.[6] Some popular Polish dumy include "Duma o Żółkiewskim", "Duma o Chodkiewiczu", and "Duma Kamieniecka."
While the name ”duma” for Ukrainian epic songs is a Polonism (a name borrowed from Polish), the songs themselves do not derive from Polish literary or musical traditions. Ukrainian dumy constitute an indigenous oral-epic form rooted in the historical and social experience of the Cossack Hetmanate and transmitted by itinerant bards known as kobzari and bandurysty.
In the early 19th century, the Russian poet Kondraty Ryleyev applied the term duma to historical or heroic songs in East Slavic culture, following his translation of Niemcewicz's “Duma o Michale Glińskim” (“Duma about Michał Gliński”).[7] This adaptation popularized the word across the Slavic literary world, where it came to denote epic or patriotic songs associated with national history and heroism.
The relationship between the military and the religion with dumy originated in the times of theCossack rebellion of 1648. Ukraine fell under the control of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, that imposed discriminatory measures on theEastern Orthodox Church. This rebellion was followed by “partition and eventual subjugation of the Ukrainian lands and the Ukrainian church.[2]: 574 The Cossacks rebelled against the religious oppression and their lands were eventually lost to the oppressor. This causes a great dilemma in the church because the Cossacks were defenders of the faith, and since they lost, and the faith is infallible, the Cossacks themselves must have done something sinful.[2]: 575 This is why a duma has a great religious undertone and is a song that tells of death and defeat, not of victory.[2]: 571–4 Pavlo Zhytetsky suggested that the style ofduma's evolved as a unique combination of folk and educated cultures.[8]
Modern folklorists treat the dumy themselves as an indigenous Ukrainian oral form rather than a borrowing from Polish literarydumy. TheEncyclopedia of Ukraine describes them as lyrico-epic works of folk origin that arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries out of the military and social life of the Zaporozhian Cossacks and frontier communities, only later acquiring the nameduma. Filaret Kolessa’s classic study of the genre’s genesis argues that their style developed through the interaction of older historical songs, church chant and the syllabic verse of early modern school drama and religious poetry.[9][10]
Some scholars push the roots of the genre further back. Drawing on comparative metrics and motifs, Kolessa and later authors have pointed to similarities between dumy and earlier East Slavic chant and lament traditions, including the medievalSlovo o polku Ihorevi, and have suggested lines of continuity between Kyivan-period epic forms and the Cossack-era dumy. In a different line of argument, Natalie Kononenko notes that many Western researchers understand dumy, together with South and East Slavic heroic songs, as regional survivals of a broader, hypothetical Proto-Slavic epic tradition rather than isolated creations of the seventeenth century.[11]
Most scholars treat the dumy as a relatively compact but internally differentiated heroic repertoire whose plots reflect the frontier wars, social tensions and religious conflicts of early modern Ukrainian history. The songs deal above all with Cossack campaigns against Ottoman andCrimean Tatar forces, captivity and escape from slavery, uprisings against thePolish-Lithuanian nobility, and conflicts within families and communities. Recent surveys emphasise that dumy are "late-stage heroic epics" of the 15th–17th centuries, closely tied to specific events and figures attested in historical sources, and that they combine heroic action with an elegiac, moralising tone unusual in many other European epic traditions.[12]
The core of the corpus consists of narratives about warfare on theBlack Sea and steppe frontier. One widely recognised cycle centres on Cossack clashes with Crimean Tatar and Ottoman forces: raids on Black Sea shipping, battles on land, the capture of Cossacks into slavery and their eventual escape or ransom. Representative pieces in this group include theDuma of Cossack Holota,Duma about the Storm on the Black Sea,Duma about the Lament of the Captives,Duma about Samiilo Kishka andDuma about the Flight of Three Brothers from the City of Azov.[13][14]
A second major cycle focuses on the Cossack uprisings and civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, above all theKhmelnytsky Uprising, and on later conflicts with Polish magnates and officials. In these songs the Cossacks appear as defenders of the Orthodox faith and of social justice, but the narratives often end in betrayal, defeat or the death of the hero, reinforcing the tragic rather than triumphalist colouring of the genre.[15][16]
Captivity in Ottoman or Crimean Tatar hands is among the most persistent themes in the dumy. Many texts describe the capture of Cossacks and townspeople during raids, their transportation to Black Sea ports and sale into slavery, and their attempts to escape or to negotiate release through ransoming. Kononenko devotes an entire chapter of her monograph to slavery and the dumy about captives, arguing that detailed references to places, practices and prices correspond closely to what is known from historical documents about theOttoman slave system.[16] This captivity cycle includes such well-known pieces as theDuma about Marusia Bohuslavka, in which a woman captured and married in a Muslim household uses her position to free Cossack prisoners, and theDuma about the Three Brothers from Azov, where heroic escape coexists with the loss and dispersal of family members.[17]
Within this thematic cycle captivity often functions both as a concrete experience of war and as a metaphor for exile, sin or estrangement from the Christian community. Images of "foreign lands", the sea as a deadly boundary and the long road home recur throughout the corpus and are shared with non-epic folk songs about hired labourers and migrants.
Although many dumy describe battles and raids, their moral focus often lies on relationships within the family and village. Kononenko’s analysis of heroism in Ukrainian epic highlights the prominence of widows, mothers and sons: the duma tradition repeatedly asks whether warriors have fulfilled their duties to parents, wives and children, and whether survivors show proper care for the families of the fallen.[18] Heroes may rescue comrades or captives at the cost of their own lives, but they may also abandon relatives or ignore parental blessing, and such failures are criticised in explicit narrator comments and in the speeches of other characters.
Many dumy embed this family-centred ethic in a Christian framework. The narrative voice frequently interprets misfortune as divine punishment for drunkenness, disobedience, betrayal of comrades or neglect of church and fasts. The songs contain exhortations to repentance and to proper burial rites, and they link the fate of individuals to the well-being of the wider Christian community. Kononenko interprets this didactic and eschatological layer as evidence of close ties between the genre and Orthodox preaching and ritual practice in the 17th century.[19]
Alongside straightforward heroic narratives, the dumy also portray social tensions within Ukrainian society. Some pieces condemn greedy or cowardly Cossack officers, corrupt town elders or landlords who oppress peasants and deny hospitality to the poor, thus framing social injustice as both a moral and a religious failing. Others feature ambiguous figures such aspoturnaky (baptised Christians who have converted to Islam) or Cossacks who enter foreign service, whose shifting loyalties reflect the complex realities of life in a multi-confessional borderland.[20][21]
In these texts the figure of the Cossack can appear in sharply different lights: as martyr and defender of the faith, as bandit or traitor, or as a tragic character caught between incompatible obligations. Such variety has led some commentators to argue that the dumy present not a single heroic ideal but a spectrum of models and warnings through which communities reflected on questions of loyalty, class conflict and the limits of legitimate violence.[16]
Modern scholarship treats the dumy as a distinct type of Ukrainian epic not only because of their subject matter but also because of their characteristic poetic form. Recent surveys describe them as "late-stage heroic epics" whose texts are built from long, syntactically complex lines of uneven length, grouped into loose periods rather than regular stanzas or fixed metres. Dumy typically employ monorhyme over several lines (often with verbs at the end of the phrase) and rely on parallelism, repetition and extended address to heighten the rhetorical effect.[22] In comparison with South Slavic heroic song, dumy lack a fixed decasyllabic line and instead move in what Philaret Kolessa and later analysts describe as an "imparisyllabic" prose-like rhythm.[23][24]
Within this flexible framework performers make frequent use of set phrases and synonymic pairs ("wide field–clean field", "dark night–deep night"), elaborate epithets and formulaic openings and endings. These stylistic features place the dumy firmly within the wider family of oral-formulaic epic traditions identified by Milman Parry and Albert Lord, even though their metre and melodic structure differ from those of Serbian or Homeric epic.[25]
Musically, dumy are performed in an elevated recitative style that follows the contour of the text rather than a regular dance or march rhythm. Their melodies typically move within a narrow ambitus, with small intervals and ornamented cadences that have often been compared to funeral lamentation.[26][27] Kolessa’s classic two-volume Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Dumas grouped recorded tunes into several types on the basis of melodic contour and cadence patterns and demonstrated the close relationship between particular melodic types and particular plots.[24][20]
Many dumy are sung in what ethnomusicologists call the "duma mode", a variant of the Dorian mode with a raised fourth degree and characteristic half-step motion towards the finalis. Recent analyses describe the tonal organisation of dumy as based either on this chromatized Dorian scale or on closely related narrow-range diatonic scales, with stable reciting tones and elaborated cadential formulas rather than functional harmonic progressions.[28]
The instrumental accompaniment provided by the kobza, bandura or lira usually reinforces these modal patterns through drones, repeated arpeggiated figures and simple harmonic outlines. Ethnographic descriptions and early recordings suggest that in traditional practice the instruments did not carry independent melodies but underpinned the voice, leaving the singer free to vary melodic formulas and rhythmic phrasing from performance to performance.[29][30]
Because dumy were transmitted orally by professional minstrel-singers, their texts and melodies exist in multiple variants. Field recordings from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that individual kobzari and lirnyky could extend, condense or recombine episodes, alter lines and substitute different formulaic phrases while preserving the basic narrative structure and melodic type of a given duma.[31][16] Kolessa and later scholars emphasise that the melodic line, with its recurring phrases and cadences, provides a framework within which such improvisation can occur, so that "text" and "tune" are inseparable aspects of a single performance tradition rather than fixed entities.[23]
Historically, dumy were performed mainly by blind male minstrels who were organised into regional guilds (tsekhy) and followed established routes between fairs, markets, monasteries and pilgrimage centres. Training in a duma repertoire formed part of a long apprenticeship in which novices learned not only specific texts and melodies but also appropriate occasions, gestures and vocal timbre for performance.[31][32]
The Soviet suppression of kobzar and lirnyk guilds in the 1930s severely disrupted this performance ecology, as many traditional singers were repressed and their roles were partially taken over by sighted performers in staged folk ensembles.[33] Since the late twentieth century, however, revival movements in Ukraine and the diaspora have sought to reconstruct historical instruments, tunings and melodic styles from archival materials and field recordings, and to reinstate dumy as a living performance tradition alongside their role as written texts in scholarly editions.[34][35]
Systematic scholarly interest in thedumy emerged in the first half of the 19th century, in the context of Romantic nationalism and the developing study of Slavic folklore. One of the earliest large collections wasIzmail Sreznevsky's six-issueZaporozhskaia starina ("Zaporozhian Antiquity", 1833–1838), which published numerousdumy and historical songs together with commentary. Shortly afterwards Platon Lukashevych issuedMalorossiiskie i chervonorusskie narodnye dumy i pesni ("Little Russian and Red Ruthenian Folk Dumy and Songs", 1836), drawing on material from central and western Ukrainian territories. These and similar editions byMykhailo Maksymovych and other Romantic-era scholars brought the genre to the attention of philologists across Europe and helped to establishdumy as a distinct branch of the Slavic heroic song tradition.[36][37]
In the early 20th century Ukrainian scholars moved from antiquarian collecting to more systematic analysis.Filaret Kolessa'sUkrains'ki narodni dumy: pershe povne vydannia z rozvidkoiu, poiasnenniamy, notamy i znymkamy kobzariv ("Ukrainian folk dumy: the first complete edition with study, commentary, music and photographs of kobzars", Lviv, 1920) offered the first full academic edition of the corpus, combining poetic texts with musical transcriptions and an extensive introductory study that situateddumy within comparative epic and chant traditions.[38]
The most ambitious pre-war corpus was compiled by the folkloristKateryna Hrushevska for theAll-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Her two-volume editionUkrains'ki narodni dumy. Teksty (1927; 1931) assembled, critically compared and annotated many recorded variants of epic songs, and proposed a typology of plots and motifs. Later scholarship has treated Hrushevska’s work as a foundational reference for the study of the genre; a projected third volume was never published after her arrest and the suppression of the project in the 1930s.[39]<[40]
After the Second World War, further fieldwork in Soviet Ukraine was heavily constrained, and much of the research ondumy shifted to the Ukrainian diaspora and Western universities. A key bridge to Anglophone scholarship was the anthologyUkrainian Dumy. Editio minor. Original Texts (Toronto–Cambridge, MA, 1979), jointly published by theCanadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and theHarvard Ukrainian Research Institute. The volume presented a critically edited selection of texts together with an English-language introduction by Natalie K. Moyle and translations by George Tarnawsky and Patricia Kilina, makingdumy accessible to readers and teachers outside Ukraine and placing them alongside other European heroic traditions.[41][42]
From the late 20th century onward, Western scholarship has increasingly examineddumy in their religious, social and performance contexts and has integrated them into wider discussions of European epic.Natalie Kononenko’s article "The Influence of the Orthodox Church on Ukrainian Dumy" (1991) analysed the genre’s theological and ritual dimensions, while her monographUkrainian Epic and Historical Song: Folklore in Context (2019) combines new English translations ofdumy with a detailed account of their historical background, performance practice and relationship to other heroic traditions.[43][16]
Recent Ukrainian and international studies continue to refine the typology and poetics of the genre. Works such as Iryna Matiash’sUkrainskyi heroichnyi epos (dumy) (Kyiv, 1995) survey the history of collecting and research within Ukraine, while Stanislav K. Rosovetsky’s article "Epic Specificity of Ukrainian Folk Dumas" (2018) analyses the narrative structure and epic features of the corpus in a comparative framework.[20] Together with the earlier corpora of Kolessa and Hrushevska, these works form the main scholarly framework through whichdumy are now studied in both Ukrainian and broader European epic traditions.
Dumy are lyrico-epic songs of folk origin about events of the Cossack era, distinguished from other historical songs by their flexible, non-strophic form and performance style. Instead of regular verses, a duma consists of unequal, often imparisyllabic lines grouped into syntactic periods that follow the unfolding of the story; rhyme usually falls on verbs and links several lines together.[44][45] They are performed in a heightened recitative, traditionally to the accompaniment of bandura, kobza or lira, in melodic patterns that have often been compared with funeral laments.[44] The performers were mainly blind itinerant minstrels – kobzari and lirnyky – who formed guild-like fraternities and circulated through fairs, religious festivals and pilgrimage centres, acting as custodians of historical memory and popular religion.[46][45]
The thematic range of dumy is relatively compact but internally differentiated. Scholars usually distinguish an older cycle dealing with conflicts between Cossacks and Tatars or Ottomans – including songs about captivity, heroic death, and the liberation of slaves – and a later cycle on Cossack–Polish wars and social themes.[44] Within these cycles, the texts combine heroic narrative with intense lyricism, a mournful tone and explicit moral reflection (for example on loyalty, family duty, and Christian piety).[44][16] In her introduction to the HURI anthologyUkrainian Dumy (1979), folkloristNatalie Kononenko (publishing then under the name Natalie K. Moyle) describes dumy and epic song more broadly as characterised by a distinctive interplay of heroism and tragedy – narratives of courage enacted “in the face of defeat”, rather than simple tales of victory.[47][48] Later studies have emphasised that this tragic colouring does not exclude depictions of successful Cossack raids and ambivalent figures such as renegades (poturnaky), so that the corpus reflects both victimhood and agency within the borderland world of the Black Sea steppe.[48]
From the point of view of performance and poetics, dumy share many features with other European oral epics. Like the South Slavic heroic songs popularised in the work ofMilman Parry andAlbert Lord, they are composed in an oral-formulaic style: singers rely on repeated formulae, synonymic pairs and stereotyped epithets to improvise long narratives in performance.[44][45] Comparative research on the “common Slavic” stock of epic formulas regularly includes Ukrainian dumy alongside Russian byliny and Serbian and Bulgarian epic songs, treating them as one branch of a wider Slavic epic system.[45] At the same time, scholars note structural differences: dumy lack a fixed metre such as the South Slavic decasyllable, favouring unequal lines and prose-like syntactic periods, and their melodies often move in narrow ranges that heighten the impression of lament rather than march or dance.[44][16]
Modern comparativists therefore place dumy in a broader continuum of European heroic and mythological song, rather than viewing them as a purely “exotic” Cossack phenomenon. Studies of mythological motifs compare cosmogonic and eschatological passages in dumy with Old Germanic and Scandinavian traditions, arguing that Ukrainian epic shares with theEdda and related texts a concern with the origins and end of the world and with the linkage between natural catastrophe and the breaking of kinship bonds.[45] Other researchers juxtapose dumy with the FinnishKalevala, South Slavic and Russian epic cycles as regional variants of a pan-European oral epic heritage, noting that all these traditions use heroic narrative to articulate collective memory of frontier warfare, social conflict and religious identity.[16][47] Within this comparative frame, the distinctive contribution of dumy lies in their combination of historical realism, elegiac tone and moral commentary, which has led scholars to assign them a place alongside, rather than on the margins of, the better-known Serbian, Finnish and Scandinavian epic canons.[44][46]