Subgenre of the curse-hayren as a magical belief expression in speech

The subject matter of the article is curse-hayrens found in the song world of hayrens (natives) called Kuchakian, which are built with curse formulas. The aim of this article is to substantiate their gusan-folk origin through the hayrens built with the formulas of the magical ancient belief of speech. The relevance of the article is the correction of the origin of the hayrens mistakenly attributed to Kuchak in Armenology. We used the professional method of hermeneutics in the research. The scientific novelty of the article is the genre definition of the curse-hayrens in question based on their features as well as the justification of the gusan-folk origin of the curse hayrens. The curse hayrens are built with curse formulas, which prove that they do not have an individual authorial origin, but are an expression of folk thinking and beliefs, which were used orally in the period of the Armenian Middle Ages as gusan-folk songs having versions and modifiers. In the discussed curses, some desires for bodily, religious-moral, social-civil and mental punishment were manifested, which appeared both directly as an expression of the magical belief in speech and in artistic representation as allegoric curse formulas. As a copying feature, taking into account the content of the discussed hayrens, which are exclusively expression-curse formulas of the belief in the magical power of speech, we determined their genre type - the curse-hayren subtype, while stating that curses are also found in other subtypes of hayrens, but they are curse-hayrens because they lack the structure of formulas as a whole, which is a requirement of the genre's stability and repeatability. Later in the 14th-18th centuries these curse-hayrens, involved in hayren verses, were registered in medieval manuscripts, none of which mentioned the name of Nahapet Kuchak as the author, but they were misattributed to him. It is quite obvious that the discussed curse-hayrens, which have versions and expressions of magical belief (curse formulae) in speech, are definitely medieval gusan-folk songs. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

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