Kobzar
[4] Kozak Mamai (Ukrainian: Козак Мамай) is a popular and iconic image that has many variants, but usually features a man sitting cross-legged and playing a kobza.
[4] Various items often surround Kozak Mamai including a horse, a tree, a rifle, a sword, and a gunpowder horn, and sometimes a bottle and cup.
[4] While the historical certainty of this image cannot be established, it represents the assumption that the original composers and singers of dumy were military musicians associated with the Kozaks.
As Natalie Kononenko writes, blindness was both a qualification for traditional kobzari, and also part of their effectiveness:"The restrictions placed on traditional minstrelsy, the restrictions that permitted only blind people to become minstrels and kept ordinary folk from performing a certain set of songs, did not inhibit the profession.
[6] Upon completing an apprenticeship, apprentices were given the status of minstrel during a secret and closed initiation rite called a vyzvilka, following which they were allowed to perform as kobzar or lirnyk.
[8] Being blind, kobzari would often require assistance in their travel, and would often hire a boy or girl to serve as a guide (povodyr).
[10] The guide would often assist the kobzar until old enough to learn a skill or trade, which was often making musical instruments due to their experience from kobzari.
[10] A kobzar's own children might serve as guide while still too young to provide farm labor, though would not usually follow their father into the minstrelry.
[12][13][14][15] The plot features a boy whose father is executed by Stalin's secret police and who is subsequently saved by a blind Ukrainian folk minstrel, a kobzar.
[18] At the turn of the nineteenth century there were three regional kobzar schools: Chernihiv, Poltava, and Slobozhan, which were differentiated by repertoire and playing style.
[20] They developed a system of rigorous apprenticeships (usually three years in length) before undergoing the first set of open examinations in order to become a kobzar.
[24] Traditional minstrels from this time period also included lirnyky or lirnyks, musicians who played the lira or hurdy-gurdy.
[25] The institution of the kobzardom essentially ended in the Ukrainian SSR in the mid 1930s during Stalin's radical transformation of rural society which included the liquidation of the kobzars of Ukraine.
In the 1930s during the period of the Holodomor, on the order of Stalin, the Soviet authorities called on all Ukrainian Kobzars to attend a congress in Kharkiv.
"[33] Soviet kobzars were stylised performers on the bandura created to replace the traditional authentic kobzari who had been wiped out in the 1930s.
[30] Early Soviet minstrels included Ehor Movchan, Fedir Kushneryk, Evhan Adamtsevych, and Avram Hrebin.
[33] These performers were often blind and although some actually had contact with the authentic kobzari of the previous generation, they were mostly self-taught, without apprenticeships, and worked from officially approved written texts.
During its preparation, the committee discussed a letter from Russian ethnographer Vsevolod Miller with the suggestion to using recently invented graphophone (Alexander Bell's version of phonograph, which used wax-coated cylinders).
They were re-issued in 1969 as a book Мелодії українських народних дум (Tunes of the Ukrainian Folk Dumas), now available in "crowd-digitized" form.
[44] Kobzar is a seminal book of poetry by Taras Shevchenko, the great national poet of Ukraine.
