Saving Tatar Language Necessary but Not Sufficient Basis for Saving Tatar Nation, Tukhvatullin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 1 – Ramil Tukhvatullin, one of Tatarstan’s most distinguished actors, raises an issue that most have avoided addressing: saving national languages are a necessary but hardly a sufficient basis for saving the nations who speak them because plays presented in national languages otherwise are only translations from others.

            Preserving national languages is a critical task, but it must not be reduced to being an end in itself, he argues (milliard.tatar/news/ramil-tuxvatullin-v-teatre-tatarskii-yazyk-zvucit-no-tatarskost-oshhushhaetsya-slabo-4743 reposted from tatar-inform.ru/news/ramil-tuxvatullin-v-teatre-tatarskii-yazyk-zvucit-no-tatarskost-oshhushhaetsya-slabo-5928659).

            Using Tatarstan theater as an example, Tukhvatullin points out that many Tatars are encouraged by the fact that ever more people are attending Tatar-language performances but fail to notice that there is little in these performances that can be described as national beyond the language.

            In fact, in many Tatar performances, “the authenticity of Tatar identity is being erased and the national core is being weakened. That is, the Tatar language sounds from the stage, but this core, which makes a Tatar performance Tatar, can’t be felt” because the specific characteristics of Tatars other than language are nowhere in evidence.

            “The result is some kind of cosmopolitan spectacle” in which the actors seem to be Tatar but really aren’t. To reverse this trend, he calls for a return to “our deep roots, oral folk art.”  To be sure, actors must create new thoughts, but “this should not involve simple copying from other peoples.”

            Otherwise, Tukhvatullin suggests, actors and Tatars more generally may speak Tatar but be something like mankurts who have lost their memory of who they are and thus of what they can be most proud of.